Grainy television news film shows President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy at Dallas' Love Field airport before entering the convertible they would be riding in when Kennedy was shot to death on Nov. 22, 1963.
Photo: Associated Press

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The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, changed the United States forever. No one who watched the events unfold that weekend could have known how profound the change would be to the nation and its people, but we did know that what we saw on television was unlike anything we'd ever seen before.

The nation will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination in the coming weeks in various ways - new books, special issues of magazines like Time and Life, and new considerations of the singular moment in history in other media. But it is particularly significant that the event will be memorialized in documentaries, re-enactments and news specials on television - not only because Baby Boomers remember spending that weekend watching the aftermath of the assassination, but because the abbreviated Kennedy presidency represented the emergence of a new and dominant role for television in news and public discourse.

Just as Barack Obama mastered the use of social media in our own century, Kennedy understood that television had grown beyond "Father Knows Best" and "The Original Amateur Hour." Even before the 1960 presidential campaign, television had made an impact in public affairs with the broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, which were aired by ABC and the DuMont networks. The precipitous drop in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's approval ratings between January and June of 1954 undoubtedly came about in part because the public could see McCarthy in browbeating action on TV.

Public image has always played a huge role in American politics. In the 19th century, another president, who would also lose his life to an assassin's bullet, was keenly aware of imagery: President Abraham Lincoln often made a point of visiting the studios of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others to sit for photographic portraits. It wasn't a coincidence that some of the sittings took place at pivotal points in his presidency.

15-minute newscasts

By the mid-20th century, while print media photography still counted, Americans could see their politicians and other public figures regularly on 15-minute evening news shows. Ironically, two television networks - NBC and CBS - expanded their evening news shows to 30 minutes only months before Kennedy went to Dallas.

Television had already played a significant role in Kennedy's career, though, beginning with the first televised live debate with Vice President Richard Nixon in September 1960, which was viewed by more than 70 million people. Those who heard the debate on radio generally gave the night to Nixon; those who saw it on television generally agreed that Kennedy won. It was all about image, the young, vigorous Massachusetts Democrat projecting cool confidence in contrast to the sweating, pasty-skinned vice president.

Kennedy won the election by a very thin margin, overcoming such issues as his relative youth, minimal experience, his Catholicism and being the pampered son of privilege. Once in office, he held 64 televised press conferences - the first time live press conferences were held in the White House. He addressed the nation in times of crisis, notably when Soviet missiles were being installed in Cuba, and to stump for his policy and legislative initiatives, including the creation of the Peace Corps, the plan to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade and the need for federal civil rights legislation.

It may be difficult for younger Americans to know what it was like that weekend in 1963. On Friday afternoon, children were sent home from school, parents wept, and the world seemed frozen in a daze of shared disbelief. The networks broke into regular programming and tried first to ascertain what had happened and then tried to make sense of it all for viewers. We knew first that Kennedy had been shot, but no one could believe it would be fatal. That didn't happen in the United States. Walter Cronkite confirmed, in that everlasting moment of raw, emotionally staggering television, that it could and that it had.

Medium matured

Television news seemed to grow up immediately that afternoon. For the rest of the weekend and on into the following week, there was only one thing on TV, and it was the aftermath of the assassination. We saw Jacqueline Kennedy returning to Washington, her suit still stained with her husband's blood. We saw the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, deliver his first official statement. He'd wanted his remarks to be televised live. And on Sunday, Nov. 24, we saw Jack Ruby's arm thrust forward from a group of reporters and onlookers and we saw Lee Harvey Oswald's body fold inward as his mouth formed an "Ohhhh."

The same day, Americans saw JFK's casket transported from the White House to the Capitol on a horse-drawn caisson. News reporters offered some commentary during the day, but nothing compared with the endless narration we've become used to in contemporary coverage of major events on TV. We were told that Black Jack, the riderless horse, with boots placed backward in the stirrups, was meant to signify a fallen leader. But mostly, Americans heard the repetitive thrum of the funeral drums as the procession made its way from the White House to the Capitol.

Momentous shift

That weekend was momentous for the nation and the world, and for television as well. The medium would become even more of a dominant source of information in the following years, bringing the Vietnam conflict into American living rooms, the marches and protests of the civil rights movement, the killings of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the dissolution of trust as a presidential administration crumbled in the wake of a so-called third-rate burglary, the assassination attempts on Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, the space shuttle Challenger disaster and 9/11.

For much of that time, breaking news meant broadcast news. Beginning with Challenger, it also meant cable news. Today, it also means social media. The media are more sophisticated, the imagery more immediate, ubiquitous and, of course, in color.

We have become used to having tragedy in our living rooms or on our computer screens now. We still react, of course, but perhaps not the same way people reacted a half century ago. You can only lose your innocence once, and that weekend in November, the nation and the television media lost theirs. It was a dreadful price to pay.